Politeness and Prurience: Situating Transgressive Sexualities in the Long Eighteenth Century

Deadline: 10/09/2012

As well as dealing with the interface between politeness and prurience as it appears throughout eighteenth-century visual, material and literary culture more generally, specific topics for papers could include:

• Bodies – the venereal body, castrati, physicalities, sadomasochism
• Settings – home and abroad, urban centres, rural backwaters
• Spaces – the architectural exterior and the private interior, the bagnio, the brothel, the masquerade
• Gaze/Experience – viewing sexualities, the keyhole testimony, description and biography
• Material Evidence – the objects of sexuality, dress, sex aids, collections, erotica
• Masculinities and Femininities – gender roles, reversals and subversions
• Modes of the illicit – sodomitical, Sapphic, pathological, pederastic, extra-marital, rape
• Public & Private – reception/reaction, fear/celebration, homophobia, display, expression
• Language – parlance, designation, rumour, slander, code